Having taken a look at a reference clocked Radeon HD 5850 board last week, we now have an opportunity to turn our attentions to what's available in the world of factory overclocked Radeon HD 5850 boards. More specifically, today we'll be shifting our focus to XFX's Radeon HD 5850 Black Edition, which follows this particular AIB's usual practice of sticking with a reference cooling solution, but making significant changes to core and memory clocks to boost performance as far as possible. Just how much of a benefit can this Black Edition part offer against a standard Radeon HD 5850?

As we mentioned in our introduction, XFX have chosen to stick with AMD's reference cooling solution for their Radeon HD 5850 Black Edition, which means that all of the exciting stuff is going on under the hood with this particular card. This good stuff comes in the form of a 765MHz core clock (a 40MHz boost over reference speeds) set against an even more impressive 1125MHz memory clock, a 125MHz boost over a standard Radeon HD 5850.